Web3-powered AI project Perle has raised an additional $9 million in a seed round led by Framework Ventures. This brings the startup’s funding to a total of $17.5 million as it looks to build a product that “rewards users for reviewing and contributing accurate data sets to AI systems.”

With the fresh injection of capital, Perle will launch Perle Labs, a product using blockchain rails and incentives for user payments and onchain attributions in an attempt to improve how AI models are trained. Perle offers "curated" data and human reviewers, according to its website.

“As AI models grow more sophisticated, their success hinges on how well they handle the long tail of data inputs — those rare, ambiguous, or context-specific scenarios,” said Ahmed Rashad, CEO of Perle and former Scale AI employee. “By decentralizing this process, we can unlock global participation, reduce bias, and dramatically improve model performance.”